The curse catches Kingsland Road
Kingsland Road arrived with one awkward piece of history hanging over them. The show had booked the X Factor group on the Friday before the public vote, only for them to be eliminated on the Sunday. Given Scott’s recent record of supporting reality-show contestants just before they went home, it looked like more evidence for the so-called Scott Mills curse.
The five-piece talked about the emotion of leaving X Factor, life in the increasingly messy contestants’ house and the acts they still fancied to do well. There was no time to brood for long, because the booking came with a much wetter obligation.
Six people, one Innuendo Bingo
For the first six-way Innuendo Bingo, all five members of Kingsland Road joined Chris. Finding enough room was part of the problem: the group arranged themselves in front of one another, some standing and some lower down, before filling their mouths with water.
The clips ranged from Mark Benton on Strictly wanting to “squeeze something in there” to sporting commentary about a hooker’s head, Peter Cockroft talking about rockets going into the wind and another appearance for the line about sitting on a gear stick. A cauliflower-cheese discussion on BBC Four also did exactly what the feature required.
Water went everywhere. One of the group ended up going down in the confusion, and the practical problem became obvious afterwards: Kingsland Road had arrived without spare clothes. Scott had managed to turn an X Factor post-mortem into the most crowded soaking the feature had attempted.
Auntie Trees says “angel”
A tiny moment in Robin Thicke’s record had also started occupying the office: the spoken word “angel”. Scott was amused by the different ways people could make one word sound suggestive and enlisted Huw Stephens for a version.
Then they rang Chris’s Auntie Trees. With minimal explanation, they asked her to say “angel” in a sexy voice. She obliged, producing a sample Scott immediately loved and wanted to keep: Chris’s own aunt had become the latest person drafted into an increasingly silly studio obsession.
Susanna Reid politely declines
The reality-TV curse was becoming difficult to ignore. Scott had previously backed Vanessa Feltz, Deborah Meaden and Rachel Riley on Strictly, and now Kingsland Road had gone from X Factor too. The solution was to find somebody capable of breaking it.
Susanna Reid looked promising, but her people politely turned down an invitation to come on the show. Scott responded by supporting her anyway, publicly throwing the supposedly dangerous Mills endorsement behind her and waiting to see whether she survived.
Charlie Sloth walks away
Charlie Sloth joined Real or No Real, where a succession of jokes about “fat” and “fattest” began to take over. The facts themselves included the Queen and an allotment and whether men were more likely to be struck by lightning, but the running gag became the story.
Charlie eventually walked out — or, in the show’s preferred description, flounced — and threatened to make a record with Big Narstie about the programme being “fattist”. What began as another Real or No Real appearance had unexpectedly created a storyline that was going to continue well beyond the afternoon.
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